A Novel Improvement for International Online Judging System and its Applications to Experimental Reform of C++ Course

The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM/ICPC) provides college students an opportunity to interact with students from other universities and to sharpen and demonstrate their problem-solving, programming, and teamwork skills. The C++ course is an important professional backbone course for the students majoring in computer science. Given some shortcomings of the traditional experimental method of the C++ course and the two vital and fatal shortcoming of the international Online Judging (OJ) system, in this paper, by adding two new parts to the description of the ACM/ICPC problem where some keywords either must appear or mustn’t appear in the C++ source codes, we first propose a novel improvement method for the international OJ system. Also, in this paper, we call our improved international OJ system as the SCUTOJ system since it is developed by South China University of Technology (SCUT). Then, we put forward a novel SCUTOJ-based experimental reform method for C++ Course. Some detailed designing principles for the keywords and characteristics of the SCUTOJ-based exercises are presented. The proposed experimental reform method significantly improves the teaching quality and it is highly praised and generally welcomed by the students. Our SCUTOJ system overcomes the two vital and fatal shortcomings of the internal OJ system and can greatly decrease the overload of the teachers and simultaneously improve the efficiency of the teaching and the experiments of the C++ course, and therefore it is a better system for contesting, teaching, and experiments of the C++ course. Introduction of ACM/ICPC The ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM/ICPC) provides a platform for ACM, industry, and academia to encourage the public and focus their attentions on the next generation of computing professionals as they pursue excellence [1]. C++ is a general purpose programming language based on the C programming language as specified in ISO/IEC 9899:1999 [2]. The course is very important for college students, especially those majoring in computer science. For the time being, the traditional experimental methods for the course mainly have the following three issues [3-6]: Firstly, the students have no interests in a pure theory teaching method, and they generally feel that the C++ course is difficult to learn and hard to apply. Secondly, for the time being, the vast majority of colleges and universities put the great assessment of the C++ course often on results, not on process in general. Finally, the C++ course, as a basic course in software design, can not culture the teamwork spirit in the traditional teaching method. International Online Judging System for C++ Course The international Online Judging (OJ) system is an online system for testing programs automatically. The program source code automatic online judging systems, often called Online Judge Systems or 2nd International Conference on Automation, Mechanical Control and Computational Engineering (AMCCE 2017) Copyright © 2017, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Advances in Engineering Research, volume 118